In the banking industry, setting up bank accounts is one of the prerequisites to becoming accessible to the financial world. As computer technologies have advanced, more and more banking and financial transactions have begun to occur offsite from the banking institution, such as direct deposit, online banking, and the like. Online banking from a personal computer (PC) allows customers to manage bank accounts, pay bills, invest money, and the like, from anywhere the customer has access to his or her computer and a network connection. One of the last transactions that involved individuals physically entering a banking institution was for opening accounts.
The financial industry is a highly-regulated industry having both state and federal regulations for conducting various financial services. Portions of these regulations are meant to deal with fraud or criminal transactions, such as money laundering. Banking regulations require institutions to gather and verify a certain amount of identification information before opening a financial account for an individual. For example, current regulations pertaining to banks for non-federally regulated banks require the bank to obtain at least a name, date of birth, address, and an identification number, such as a social security number, a tax identification number, a passport number, or the like. Moreover, the bank must verify all of this information within a certain period of time after opening the account. While this regulated process is useful in preventing money laundering, fraud, and the like, it creates impediments to a streamlined account opening process (referred to as “onboarding”) that customers would like for convenience banking, such as online or mobile banking.
With the increase in online and mobile banking, financial institutions have begun to offer offsite onboarding or online/mobile account creation. However, because of the regulatory requirements, it is still very difficult to achieve a fully online or streamline onboarding process. Some offsite onboarding features begin the onboarding process online by accepting identity information entered by the customer. Before the account is opened, however, the financial institution may send physical letters to the customer with verification data contained therein for the customer to again access the financial institution online to enter this verification data. This process may include multiple such physical letters mailed to the customer for the verification process. Therefore, while the customer is afforded the convenience of beginning the onboarding process online from a PC or mobile device, the entire process takes a number of days to complete until the account is actually opened and accessible.